Now that BP’s runaway Macondo well is killed, now that the political fervor has cooled, pubic outrage eased and claims liability has been handed over to the federal government, BP’s decided to fight back.

Blaming the media is a favorite tactic of embattled executives, of course. Certainly, in a disaster of this magnitude, scientists are going to explore scenarios that don’t pan out. That’s especially true given that BP was issuing misleading assessments of the size of the spill.

Dudley himself clung to the corporate fiction that the spill was leaking only 5,000 barrels a day, despite scientists saying in in the early days after the leak began that it was as much as four times that amount. Now, the government says the flow rate was closer to 62,000 barrels a day.

In other words, while Dudley can criticize concerns that may have been overstated, he spent most of the summer understating the effects of the spill.

BP, after all, was ill-prepared for such a disaster and filed spill plans that were thoroughly inadequate for the scope of the disaster. If the company was really concerned with easing public fears, it could have been more honest about the size of the spill and its ability to combat it from the beginning.

Instead, we see the new CEO following a similar pattern to his predecessors in which contrition and talk of responsibility gives way to denial, and change remains elusive.